The Pencil; A History of Design and Circumstance

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. First Edition [stated], presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. xi, [1], 434 pages. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Format is 5.5 inches by 9.5 inches. Henry Petroski (February 6, 1942) is an American engineer specializing in failure analysis. A professor of history at Duke University. Petroski has written over a dozen books - beginning with To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design and including a number of titles detailing the industrial design history of common, everyday objects, such as pencils, paper clips, and silverware. He is a frequent lecturer and a columnist for the magazines American Scientist and Prism. Before beginning his work at Duke in 1980, Petroski worked at the University of Texas at Austin from 1968-74 and for the Argonne National Laboratory from 1975-80. Petroski is the Aleksandar S. Vesic Professor of Civil Engineering and a professor of history at Duke University. In 2004, Petroski was appointed to the United States Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board and was reappointed in 2008. From an Amazon Review: Like most other human artifacts, the common pencil has a long and complex history. Henry Petroski, who combines a talent for fine writing with a deep knowledge of engineering and technological history, examines the story of the pencil, considering it not only as a thing in itself, but also as an exemplar of all things that are designed and manufactured. Petroski ranges widely in time, discussing the writing technologies of antiquity. But his story really begins in the early modern period, when, in 1565, a Swiss naturalist first described the properties of the mineral that became known as graphite. Petroski traces the evolution of the pencil through the Industrial Revolution, when machine manufacture replaced earlier handwork. Along the way, he looks at some of pencil making's great innovators--including Henry David Thoreau, who worked in his father's pencil factory, inventing techniques for grinding graphite and experimenting with blends of lead, clay, and other ingredients to yield pencils of varying hardness and darkness. Petroski closes with a look at how pencils are made today--a still-imperfect technology that may yet evolve with new advances in materials and design. --Gregory McNamee.